Dr. med. Dr. phil. Dr. med. habil. Michael K. Stehling

Founder, Owner and Medical Director, ANOVA Institute for Regenerative Medicine

Physicist, physician and inventor – from echo-planar MRI with Sir Peter Mansfield to non-thermal tumour ablation and licensed stem cell manufacturing.

• University Professor of Radiology, Jerusalem University (AQU)
• fmr. Fellow, Harvard Medical School, Boston
• Associate Professor of Radiology, Boston University
• Visiting Scholar, University of California, Berkeley

Michael Stehling is a physicist and physician whose career has been driven by a single question: what is technically possible in medicine that is not yet being done?

He studied medicine and physics, and it is the physicist's habit of mind – analyse the problem, then find a solution – that has shaped everything since. As a young researcher he worked with Sir Peter Mansfield in Nottingham on the development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), for which Mansfield received the Nobel Prize in 2003. His doctoral thesis was on Echo-Planar Imaging (EPI), the technique that reduced MRI acquisition from minutes to a fraction of a second. Stehling was first author of the 1991 Science paper that introduced EPI to the wider scientific world, and later co-edited the first comprehensive book on the subject. Today, essentially every functional MRI, diffusion and perfusion study performed anywhere in the world rests on this method.

That work took him from Nottingham to the Siemens Medical Systems Research and Development division in Erlangen, to Harvard Medical School in Boston as Clinical Fellow, to the LMU University Hospital in Munich as Section Chief of MRI, to Boston University as Associate Professor of Radiology, and to the University of California, Berkeley, as Visiting Scholar at professorial level. In Berkeley began his long collaboration with the bioengineer Boris Rubinsky, the inventor of Irreversible Electroporation (IRE), a cancer treatment technology named by Times Magazine the most important invention in medicine in 2025.

From that collaboration came E² – the synergistic combination of electroporation and electrolysis – a vastly improved non-thermal tumour ablation technology, developed, characterised and published over more than a decade of joint work. Stehling co-founded InterScience to bring the technology forward; parts of it were subsequently acquired by Intuitive Surgical Inc., the manufacturers of the da Vinci surgical robot, a medtech giant.

Another tumour ablation technology Stehling is involved in is ECryo, whose cryoablation device couples freezing with electrolysis so that, for the first time, the visible ice ball corresponds to the actual kill zone – what you see is what you get.

Stehling is a co-founder and investor in Biochoric, where he serves as Chief Medical Officer – the company which has solved the cryo-preservation problem of organs: the isochoric cryopreservation technology it develops affords the storage of transplant organs at −80 °C and has been awarded breakthrough status by the FDA of the USA.

In clinical practice he has repeatedly been first. He introduced irreversible electroporation (IRE) for prostate cancer into German practice and reported the largest early clinical series worldwide. He was the first to implement and publish electro-chemotherapy (ECT) as a treatment for prostate cancer, developed the combined IR-ECT approach, and pioneered immunotherapeutic concepts including intra-tumoural priming. At the VITUS private clinic in Offenbach, more than 2,000 electroporation-based prostate treatments have been performed by 2025 – more than at any other institution in the world.

With ANOVA he took the same approach into regenerative medicine. Together with Dr. Nicole Kühl he founded the institute and established the first facility in Germany to hold official manufacturing authorisations for two stem cell products, creating the regulatory and production basis for genuinely translational treatment concepts rather than improvised ones.

He is, by training and inclination, a scientist and inventor. That he is also a radiologist – specifically an interventional radiologist – was in some sense an accident of career, but a fortunate one: medical imaging and image-guided minimally invasive intervention are steadily displacing open surgery across every discipline of medicine, and they are the natural instruments of the work he does.